The gender pay gap, the difference in earnings of men and women, has remained remarkably resilient over the past two decades in Australia and a number of other countries, despite a range of legislative and policy initiatives aimed at narrowing this difference. Drawing upon industry-wide data and an organisational case, this analysis of professional business services examines the nature of pay equity within and beyond organisational boundaries. We conclude that ‘success’ in gender and pay equity terms has been constrained by minimum government compliance requirements and limited attention to the role labour markets play in contributing to gendered patterns of pay.

This paper examines how national culture informs the sourcing of management knowledge through external consultancy. First, it hypothesises and compares the relationship between quantitative measures of Hofstede's cultural indices with adjusted expenditure on consulting in nine countries. Two cultural indices are found to correlate with consulting use – power distance (negatively) and individualism (positively). However, the disparity between our findings and prior research suggests limitations of generalisation in studies solely employing quantitative cultural indices to understand the purchasing of business knowledge. We therefore propose the use of supplementary, qualitative data with sensitivity to local contexts and briefly apply this by using secondary sources to provide historical narratives for two countries – the UK and Japan. Overall, we find and tentatively explain significant statistical relationships between Hofstede's cultural indices and adjusted expenditure on consultancy. We then draw attention to wider implications for consulting research and for practitioners involved in this context.